“That question, ‘Who am I?,’ or, more acutely,
‘Who the hell am I?,’ is the basis of everything.”
I am racing the rain in the back of a London cab with Mr. Delroy Lindo. I was advised by a well-traveled friend to trust only this as a means of conveyance—the pug-nosed solidity of the classic black taxi, the encyclopedic patter of drivers versed in every alleyway and heath. We jounce over cobblestones, heading out of St. Pancras station toward the Young Vic theater on the South Bank. Mr. Lindo has agreed to answer what questions he can in the little time we have.
Outside, umbrellas amble along Brompton, Harrods breaks like a great ship over gray horizon—an anglophile’s wet dream—yet I am transported by the actor’s unmistakable brow and regal jaw to the smoke and storm of Oakland: Delroy Lindo in a velour black-and-white tracksuit as Aaliyah’s overprotective kingpin daddy, Isaak O’Day, in the raucous Jet Li vehicle Romeo Must Die (2000); Lindo rolling through the Gowanus projects, dispensing wisdom and ass-whuppings, as Rodney Little in Spike Lee’s near-operatic crime drama Clockers (1995); Lindo in cowboy hat and black duster, cutting almost too foine a figure as legendary lawman Bass Reeves in Jeymes Samuel’s beautifully defiant Black Western, The Harder They Fall (2021).
My referents for this moment are deeply Black and American. B-boys and barristers aspire to the slow burn of Southern diphthongs tugging on the coattails of Adrian Boseman’s Chi-Town courtroom manner (The Good Fight TV series, 2017–22). Bed-Stuy divas and Philly schoolteachers cream and sugar over at the Brooklyn drawl of Woody Carmichael beseeching a weary wife for more time, more space (Crooklyn, 1994). Delroy Lindo embodies the inextricable intermarriage of urbanized Southern origins: an easy gait quick to turn from pirouette to dagger, an unflinching gaze that sifts softly into listening yet is honed sharp enough to mark the fool. He is Black America’s quintessential older brother, uncle, deeply present and wayward father, enforcer, pusher, lover, with a voice modulated to the rise and fall of stride piano. Even as he “took an’ tole us” who he was, channeling the swag and patois of West Indian Archie in Spike Lee’s 1992 masterpiece Malcolm X, we continued to believe he was solely our own, and nothing could keep us from it.
In his yet-to-be-titled memoir, slated to be published in 2026 by Little, Brown and Company, Delroy Lindo does not challenge the lineage Black Hollywood and ardent fans have assigned him, but instead asks that we see him—see him truly—as a child of the Diaspora, the son of a Jamaican émigré, a young woman who journeyed alone across the waters to London during the historic Windrush migration. Alongside some surprisingly personal and painful revelations, this history and his mother’s struggles—to survive the inclement social and economic weather of 1950s London while raising a Black boy on her own so far from home—haunt the pages of a book crafted with the same lyricism and command the Tony Award–nominated actor is known for bringing to the stage.
I am here as part of a trio of early readers of his memoir—what Delroy calls the Triumvirate—that includes British writer and cultural critic Miranda Pyne and San Francisco–based author Diana Cohn. Delroy and I have spent much of our time visiting the sites of his childhood, including foster and group homes across southeast London, deep in the belly of white working-class British kindliness and aggression. Our cab ride was preceded by a day of riding shotgun in a black Peugeot, Mr. Lindo at the wheel, double-clutching, gearshift in hand, navigating narrow streets, talking about many things: art, longing, excellence and fear, the uncanny necessity of both exile and return.
—Erica Vital-Lazare
I. “A HUMAN POINT OF VIEW”
THE BELIEVER: I want to know how you get to a place where you are so real, in front of a camera, in front of an audience, onstage.
DELROY LINDO: It may sound glib, but it’s practice, practice, practice. Thank god I took the time to train as an actor and to form a relationship with craft, so that when I’m working, no matter in what medium, I am attempting to pay attention to the technical aspects of the thing.
BLVR: I want to ask you about a scene.
DL: OK.
BLVR: It’s a scene in Get Shorty. You’re Bo Catlett, a gangster who is very obviously a student of film. He’s dabbling in screenwriting and falls into something of an impromptu development meeting with John Travolta’s character, Chili Palmer, a gangster breaking into movie production. You, as Bo Catlett, are in your element. You can feel your character thinking, Hey, I have someone here I’m talking to about the thing I love—moviemaking rather than gangstering. You’re so beautifully ebullient. You want to share ideas about the script that Chili’s strong-arming into production. Where someone else might have played the part with some sort of bluster or bravado, you instead become so vulnerable. There’s an undercurrent of joy, but you don’t know if you can claim the joy, because you’re also a gangster in a confrontation with a gangster.
DL: Listen. Here’s the thing. And this is where I believe technique comes in. For me, being inside the life of a character—and this, I think, speaks to the choices one could have made compared to the choice one actually makes—that scene is about two aspirational human beings trying to get a job done. And it’s aspirational because we both want to be in the movie business. And here’s a piece of material, a script, that will allow us both to transform. And in that moment, in that scene, he figuratively slaps me in the face.
BLVR: He shuts you down when you offer notes on his script.
DL: He shuts me down. But from a technique or technical point of view, one does not go into that scene thinking, Man, I’m a gangster trying to do this other thing [moviemaking]. I go into it thinking, from a human point of view, I’m Bo Catlett and here’s an opportunity to achieve a dream of mine.
Early on, I knew I wanted to pursue a certain versatility. I knew I wanted to create a range of different characters, which was the reason why, after I left the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, where I studied for two years, I went to New York, as opposed to Los Angeles: because I hoped that in going to New York and working in the theater, I would be challenged to do a range of different parts, and that’s exactly what happened.